The World According to an Obama Voter

RUSH: Jerry, Wilmington, Delaware, you’re next. I’m glad you waited, sir. Great to have you on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you?

RUSH: Good.

CALLER: I’ve listened to you for over 20 years.

RUSH: I appreciate that, sir.

CALLER: Really enjoy your show. I know you are a distinguished professor of advanced conservative studies, and I know that you can give me an intellectually honest answer to a couple questions I have. One, you know the electorate still blames Bush for the economy.

RUSH: Well, of the people who voted, a majority blame Bush.

CALLER: Correct. In your opinion, when did Obama’s policies kick in and Bush’s policies were not affecting the economy anymore? When did this exactly become Obama’s economy? Because, you know, when he took office… (cell garbled)

RUSH: That’d be about six weeks after he took office.

CALLER: Six weeks.

RUSH: Yeah. That’s when he passed the stimulus. Bush never did anything like that. The stimulus, then the various tax increases. I think Obama owned the economy within actually a month.

CALLER: Within a month, all of Bush’s affect should have been out the door?

RUSH: In fact, there’s so much… They’re trying to tell us today that the Bush economy let to the recession, created the recession and all that and the economic collapse in 2008. That wasn’t Bush. That was the subprime mortgage problem that came due. That’s when the excrement hit the fan. Bush actually tried to prevent that from happening. No, look, the Bush people never defended themselves; I don’t know why I am.

But they never defended themselves. But that economic collapse, the seeds were sown during the Bill Clinton era. That economic collapse was a the Democrat Party recipe. Now, the Republicans helped because in the second term of Bush there was — there was incredible federal spending, but the idea that Obama’s policies had no impact whatsoever on this economy for his entire first term is absurd. You don’t believe that, do you?

CALLER: No, I don’t believe that, but I… It would be absurd also to say that eight years of Bush was out the window after four weeks. Come on! Really.

RUSH: I’m telling you that Obama put his signature on this economy in the first 30 days with the stimulus. A trillion dollars of brand-new spending, unfunded and unpaid for.

CALLER: Well, Bush, uh, put in a unfunded, uh, you know, drug bill and, , uh,you know, there’s… There were two unfunded wars. You cannot expect that Obama could have turned things around in five or six weeks, Rush. Come on.

RUSH: I don’t expect Obama to ever turn things around. He doesn’t want to turn things around. Obama built on what was going wrong.

CALLER: Well, I — I equate it to everybody getting Medicare. And, you know, if you like Medicare and you want to give it to everybody, uhh, and everybody contributes, I really think that’s going to help in the long run.

RUSH: That’s not what’s happening. Medicare is staying as is. It has its own taxes. It has its own tax table. It is not part of Obamacare. Now, you might think that Obamacare is structured like Medicare for everybody, but it would have been much cheaper just to do Medicare for everybody than this. It would have been much cheaper just to insure the 30 million that didn’t have it! We coulda done that for one one-hundredth of what Obamacare is costing. See, Obamacare is not about health care. I can’t believe we’re still litigating this. I cannot believe… What is this, 2010?

CALLER: Isn’t that what Romney did in Massachusetts.

RUSH: Sorry, what was that?

CALLER: Wasn’t that what Romney did in Massachusetts, uh, in terms of trying to insure everyone?

RUSH: We need to hire you as a professor here at the distinguished institute.

CALLER: Well, I don’t know if I would be conservative studies, but, you know, I am a Democrat.

RUSH: Right. Right.

CALLER: I still think that the discussion —

RUSH: Can you tell me, when did Bush’s influence end? You’re asking me when Obama’s kicked in. When did Bush’s influence end?

CALLER: Well, on the day that the… uh, the day that the stimulus was passed — I would say from probably six months after that date — you could probably attribute 50% of what was going on to what Obama was doing.

RUSH: Is that right? Six months after the stimulus, 50% of what was going on was Obama’s?

CALLER: And as I understand, most of the stimulus hasn’t even been spent.

RUSH: Well, no, it has. It was spent in the campaign. But you’re right, a lot of it was not. Not all of it, but a significant amount of it was not. It was the same with TARP. It was the same with TARP — which, of course, that was a crisis. We had to spend that in 24 hours or the economy was gonna end, the world was gonna end! Do you remember that?

CALLER: Oh, I remember everything Obama inherited.

RUSH: Yeah. That’s right.

CALLER: And that was part of my the second question.

RUSH: Exactly right. Obama inherited it.

CALLER: Bush did it. Part of my second question is, when did another president inherit such a worse set of circumstances? Who?

RUSH: Obama. Next year, Obama’s gonna inherit a bigger mess than he inherited in 2008.

CALLER: We gonna have less… We gonna have one less war, the — the — the, uh, unemployment is falling. You know, is going down.

RUSH: No, it isn’t. We are gonna be $22 trillion in debt by the time Obama finishes his second term. Obama is inheriting a bigger mess next month than he inherited in 2008. And that, Jerry, is because he caused a bigger mess than existed in 2008. He has given himself his own problem. Except to him it isn’t a problem. It’s the direction he wants to go. Reagan inherited a much worse economy than Obama did.

RUSH: It was much worse. Reagan had two recessions in his first four years. In addition to the disaster that Jimmy Carter left him. You can look it up.

CALLER: I still don’t think it equals what Obama inherited.

RUSH: Oh. Well, we’ll just have to disagree agree to disagree. But regardless, the mess that Obama’s gonna inherit next year or next month when he’s inaugurated? Whew! That’s the biggest mess that any president’s ever inherited. You can go to bank on that one, Jer’, old buddy.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, I would submit, ladies and gentlemen, that the economy really started plunging before Obama was even inaugurated. November and December of 2008 is when unemployment started skyrocketing. That’s when people started being laid off, because small businesses knew what was ahead of ’em. They knew. ‘Cause Obama talked about all he was gonna do, health care, nationalized health care, all the stimulus, they knew what was gonna happen, and they started laying people off in preparation for it.